You're confusing individual copyright holders with the middlemen that some of them are tied to. Big difference.
No, I'm not. In the vast majority of cases, the copyright holder is the middleman. Most people who do creative work do so for someone else. The creator doesn't retain the copyright, the person they're doing the work for does.
And for most individual creative endeavors, the copyright isn't owned by the creator, it's owned by the publisher. The assignment of copyright to the publisher has become a condition of getting paid at all.
No, in the general case the copyright holder and the middleman are one and the same.
If you every created anything, you too are a copyright holder.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned the "copyright holders" in the TFA in particular, but I suppose I should have been more clear that I'm limiting my comments to them, and not extending them to all copyright holders everywhere.
In my humble opinion, copyright should be nontransferable, and should belong solely to the original creator of a work, or to every individual involved in the joint creation of a work. It's fine for the copyright holder(s) to exclusively license their work(s) to a corporation, even for free, but the right for them to terminate the license at will (despite any contractual wording to the contrary) should be built into law. This is the only way I can see copyright properly benefitting the original creators of a work. The system we have right now, where copyright is almost always immediately and irrevocably transferred to some corporation, is little more than a system of slavery.
I suspect that the original authors of the Constitution saw it that way, too.
They never have. Perhaps the biggest role of the corporations that belong to the organizations mentioned in TFA is to act as a middleman. Today they add almost no value to the economic equation. That means they're basically parasites. Parasites that, in this case, don't give a fuck about the host (the public) they prey upon.
As long as they get theirs, that's all that matters to them. And they will do everything in their considerable power to make sure that remains the case. They embody everything that is wrong with modern crony capitalism.
While it seems like most of us slashdotters are in agreement of how the Patriot Act is dangerous and unconstitutional, it seems as if the majority of the American people support it. Their mentality seems to be this, "Well there's no reason for ME to worry". We need to change this viewpoint in order for change to occur.
Oh, don't worry. They'll change their viewpoint eventually...when they find that they're living in an oppressive police state. Of course, it'll be far too late by then, but they'll at least be getting what they deserve...
A "credit card" that draws directly from your checking account? Without even needing a PIN (since it acts like a credit card)? So that if you lose it, whoever picks it up can purchase things with it and the money in question gets drawn directly from your account?
What completely-out-of-his-mind moron decided this would be a good idea?
I'm sorry, but I refuse to get an account with a debit card. I will always insist on an ATM card and make sure the account in question cannot have a debit card issued against it.
Now, admittedly the particular case in TFA involves PINs, so ATM cards would ostensibly be susceptible to the same attack, but it beats not having anything at all protecting your account...
I haven't ditched my landline (it could come handy in an emergency) but I now screen all incoming calls with the answering machine. I already have all the ringers turned off.
The vast majority of telemarketers will just hang up. That's fine with me.
I just wish they'd figure out that they're never going to get an answer from anyone here at my place anymore.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people like me is growing fast.
Congratulations, telemarketing industry. You are likely to be telemarketing yourselves out of business. Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on your ass on the way out.
Ah, besides. Can you imagine Congressional debate on whether to use CVS, svn, or... what am I thinking? Free software wouldn't even be on the table.
Bitkeeper, then?
Then a congressional aide will attempt to reverse engineer the protocol it uses and get caught. Bitkeeper will revoke the license, and Congress will wind up implementing their own version control system and releasing it as Free software!
Sounds like a plan to me! Well, except that the resulting revision control system will be so convoluted and have so many loopholes, exploits, etc., as to be useless. What else would you expect from Congress?
... and I can spell and use proper grammer better than you.
Man, I just love it when people say things like this. They inevitably make some sort of mistake which negates their statement very nicely. For instance, it's "grammar", not "grammer".
And many thought that when our founding fathers(I don't know if you're in the US or not, and I don't care, I'm talking "our founding fathers" in the sense of me being an American, if you're not, good for you) dared to challenge the sovereignty of the British Crown, that they were doing what was "basically impossible". You don't shake the world by walking around thinking everything is impossible.
This ain't the 1700's. Back then, the average firepower of an armed civilian was only slightly less than the average firepower of a soldier.
Today, the average firepower of a soldier is, after you factor in all the supporting firepower he has at his disposal (tanks, mortars, bombs, aircraft, etc.) is thousands of times that of the average civilian. And if we include weapons of mass destruction, that ratio rises to millions.
If the King of England had been able to drop a nuke onto the U.S. revolutionaries, the revolution would have been stopped dead in its tracks. What makes you think that a government whose existence is threatened by its own population won't be willing to do the same (and that's only if the thousands-to-one firepower advantage they already have proves to not be enough)?
So don't go busting out the U.S. revolution as a shining example of what can be accomplished today, because it doesn't even come close to applying to the modern world.
It is not impossible to shake people's faith in the media, the problem is the attempts so far have been made by partisan drones who want people to believe in their favorite outlets. That has to end. It simply has to end. And ending it is not impossible, unless of course, you already believe its impossible, then you won't even try.
No, not impossible, I'll grant you that.
But even if you shake people's faith in the media, the media in question has to be replaced with something that is as easily accessible. Not only must it be as easily accessible, it must also not be centrally controlled (for if it's centrally controlled then those who currently control the media can gain control over it, and we're back to where we started).
There is nothing that meets those requirements. Not even the internet. Every other method of information distribution requires a lot more work on the part of the recipient. If you try to ignore the inherent laziness of humans, then your attempt at replacing the mass media will have failed before it begins.
The PTBs love your ass, I'll tell you that much. 90 percent of their control of us is in our heads. IN OUR HEADS. Their control is already in your head.
What's in my head is the result of observing the real world. I'm a realist. What "control" the PTBs have over me is at the point of a gun. I don't listen to the mass media. If I did, I wouldn't recognize the problem. I do recognize the problem. I also recognize, because I'm a realist, that it's effectively impossible to fix it now. We're way past the point of no return. Ignore that at your own peril, for the real world doesn't give a crap what you believe.
So you say that the citizens of the united states should shut up, bend over and calmly take what's coming their way?
It's not like there's anything else that can possibly be done anymore. Nobody who understands the situation and wants to change it has enough power or control to do anything about it. Those who do have that kind of power and control are the very people who benefit from the situation.
And there's no chance for a revolution to work, because the government has all the guns that matter.
So what, really, can the citizens possibly do? Talk about it? That won't do any good. Talk without action does nothing, and the government controls what actions are possible.
People have to be shown clearly, that it isn't one or the other party, that both parties need to removed from office, and that we need to put people in office who don't owe their political careers to political head giving. It really is not that hard. It's a lot easier than a violent revolution.
No, it's basically impossible.
The reason it's impossible is that people make their decisions based on what they know, and even now what they know is determined primarily by what the mass media tells them.
And that mass media is owned by a small number of large corporations, which are in turn controlled by the very people who are responsible for getting us into this mess to begin with. Those people want nothing but absolute power, absolute control.
Until the information people receive comes primarily from some other source, election of someone who belongs to neither party (or, more precisely, who doesn't answer to the people who control the media) will remain effectively impossible.
Oh, and I might also mention that violent revolution cannot succeed either. The government has all the guns that really matter, and the pathetic peashooters that the general population is "allowed" to have cannot stand against the hardware that the government now controls.
Better get used to living in a totalitarian state. It's going to be with us for a very, very long time.
In fact, Apple and Mozilla are shining examples of software that competes very well in the MS monopoly. Why? because they don't suck, spam you, or are owned by someone who doesn't know what to do with it.
No. In the case of Mozilla, it's because it's free and has a sufficient number of additional features (not the least of which is that it's far more secure). If either of those things were not true, then it wouldn't be able to "compete".
When the nature of a market is such that the only way to "compete" against the dominant money-making player is to build your product using the freely-given labor of others and then turn around and give it away for free (source and all!), then the market itself isn't free at all: it's monopolized. In fact, it's monopolized to the point that only the monopolizer can make money in it, a far worse situation than most monopoly situations.
As for Apple, the only reason they are a player in the market is that they sell their own computer systems with their own OS and with the product in question bundled with it. Without that, they never would have gotten a foothold. Beyond that, they too give away the software in question (at least for Windows), so they're not really making any money in the market, either.
Microsoft's bundling of various products (e.g., media player) forces their competition to give away their products for free. A market in which the only company that can get away with charging (indirectly) for its product happens to be the monopolizer is no market at all.
It's only because of the unique nature of software that free alternatives exist at all: software has a low enough barrier to entry that people can produce it in their spare time, can easily be modified and improved upon by others, and can be replicated at will. That means that one needn't spend any more time or money to produce it than they would with any other hobby. If any of those conditions weren't true, free software as we know it would not exist at all, and the monopoly that Microsoft really has would be blindingly obvious.
The references to PostGreSQL and Ingress are really red herrings - as far as I know SAP has never suggested that they might be suitable backends for SAP, and its unlikely that they will do any work in that direction as Oracle could pull the rug out from under them again in the same way.
Uh, no. PostgreSQL isn't owned by any company. Because of that, Oracle can't do the same thing to it that it did to MySQL. That makes it an excellent possible backend for SAP, if SAP needed such a thing.
Furthermore, it's under the BSD license, so SAP wouldn't even need to redistribute the source in order to make use of it.
A downside of the immediacy of the Internet is that there is little time or inclination to edit and double-check.
That needn't be the case. Even for IM, a quick once-over before hitting "Send" is enough to catch most errors.
Even so, I can understand why one's spelling/grammar might be somewhat lacking when using IM. But I think it's inexcusable that the same thing occurs in blogs and other, more permanent, forms of communication where the time constraint simply isn't there.
No, I think the bottom line is that the people being discussed here simply cannot write properly regardless of the forum or the circumstances. That will most assuredly cause them trouble later on, when it becomes necessary for them to write lengthy and detailed essays. At that time they'll find that they simply can't do so, because they lack the necessary skills.
The people in question apparently simply don't care how well they are communicating via the written word. If they don't care about something so fundamentally important, how likely is it that they'll care about other, equally critical things?
...it's... mystifying how the editor failed completely to catch the misinterpretation.
It is? I thought the editors were selected for their ability to uphold the grand Slashdot tradition of not RTFA before commenting (or, in this case, "editing"... and it's not like any other particular trait appears to be selected for)... no?
They [China's laws] may not completely mesh with those of the western world, but it's not our job to decide if they're right.
That may be true when deciding whether or not to actively interfere with the internal workings of the Chinese government.
It is absolutely not true when deciding whether or not to interact with the Chinese government (which is essentially what's required for Google, Yahoo, and others to do business there) and to acquiesce to their demands.
For all of you that are in any way still confused about this issue, let me set up an example that should make the issue very clear.
Suppose that one of China's laws is that any corporation that wishes to do business in China must assassinate whomever the Chinese government tells them to. Should Google and friends do business in China under those conditions?
I doubt anyone who values any rights at all would say yes to the above question.
Get this straight: censorship is a violation of your rights as surely as assassination is. It is at a minimum a violation of your right to free speech. The only difference is the severity of the violation.
And for those of you who believe that U.S. corporations must do business in China no matter what laws they have to follow because they have a "duty to their shareholders", consider this: do they have a similar "duty" to set up assassination ("killer for hire") businesses in countries in which assassination is legal?
Those of you who believe that corporations must do everything possible to acquire wealth had better realize one thing: completely unregulated capitalism, in which no act in the name of business is forbidden is the same as the mafia. The mafia, too, does what it does because it's "just business, nothing personal".
Such a world is an anathema to those who value their rights.
No corporation which would sacrifice the rights of others in order to do business should reap the benefits of being a U.S. corporation. Their charter should be revoked. If they want to become a Chinese corporation, then so be it. But if they want the benefits of being a U.S. corporation, then they should damned well respect the founding principles of the U.S. in everything they do, even if the U.S. government itself at this time does not (and note that the reason the U.S. government does not is that these very same corporations are the entities that now control the U.S. government).
Which means that the bottom line is this: we now live in a police state. If the police want to search your car, you'd better let them, because the consequences will be... unfortunate... if you don't. At the very least your car will be trashed and/or you'll be out a decent amount of money.
So: better get used to living in a police state, because it's going to get a lot worse, not better.
Re:People are Obese regarless of Income or Geograp
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
The answer is no where near as simple as you make it out to be. Obesety exists for a variety of reasons - but the most prevalent one, the one that strikes the majority of people is gluttony, paired with laziness.
People eat until their body tells them to stop. "Gluttony" here simply means that their body doesn't tell them to stop until it's far too late.
This is why some people, even in the U.S., aren't obese -- some people have signals that tell them to stop eating early enough that they don't wind up ingesting excess calories.
It shouldn't be surprising that there are some people like that, because the scarcity of food obviously varied between geographic areas.
And yes, the entire obesity thing is actually quite complicated in detail. Among the complicating factors are how many fat cells someone has at birth, the types of foods they naturally gravitate towards, the availability of that food, their emotional state, etc. But the basic reason it occurs at all, and the reason it's so difficult to fight, is directly tied to the circumstances the human body has (in general, more or less) evolved to deal with.
As for "laziness", that too is a factor. "Laziness" here simply means that people don't get the same amount of exercise their ancestors did. That's not surprising, as it's one of the consequences of technology and automation.
If technology and automation actually gave people a larger amount of free time, perhaps more people would exercise for longer. Perhaps not. But regardless, technology hasn't brought such benefits for most people: they still have to spend the same amount of time (if not more!) working as their ancestors did, but the types of activities involved in "work" are vastly different thanks to that technology. Hence "laziness".
By the way, it should be noted that "laziness" is also a consequence of the evolutionary process mentioned previously. "Laziness" is the unwillingness to do any more work than is necessary. It causes the "lazy" person to not expend more energy than is necessary. When food is scarce, it should be obvious that "laziness" is very much a necessary survival characteristic -- someone who needlessly expends energy when food is scarce will not be as likely to survive as someone who doesn't.
You can believe that these things are all a concious choice if you like. That doesn't mean you're correct.
Re:People are Obese regarless of Income or Geograp
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Well duh...
Look, the cause of obesity is really very simple: the human body (and its ancestors) evolved in environments in which food was scarce, and during that time mechanisms came into being which helped to deal with that scarcity. As a result, it has built-in mechanisms to ensure that there will be sufficient energy store for the body to use for all but the most drastic of food shortages. These mechanisms include the fat store, the tendency for fat to accumulate much more easily than it's used, and an appetite control mechanism that encourages overeating (since who knows when the next meal will become available?).
Now take the human body and put it into an environment where all the food one could ever want is easily available for the taking (all it requires is a small amount of money). What do you expect will happen?
Well, duh...the body will behave as it always has: under the assumption that while food might be plentiful now, it's not likely to be plentiful for long, so better stock up now while it can.
And thus, obesity.
And the reason obesity is so difficult to deal with, and why sustained weight loss has such a lousy track record (95%+ failure rate), is simple: to fight obesity, you have to fight your own body's instinctive drive to "save up for a rainy day".
But really if you found a page about yourself in the wikipedia full of critisisms you would think about changing them.
Perhaps, but the way I would go about changing them would be very different.
You see, in my mind the way to fight disinformation is with information. If someone makes a false claim about me on a page that I can edit, I'll edit the page and respond to the claim. The only modification I'll likely make to the claim itself is to add "some people believe..." to the beginning of it.
That way the original commentary remains, but I get my say about it as well. It then becomes up to the reader to decide what they believe.
And in my opinion, the approach itself will say something about me that will hopefully be considered by the reader when they form their opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm not. In the vast majority of cases, the copyright holder is the middleman. Most people who do creative work do so for someone else. The creator doesn't retain the copyright, the person they're doing the work for does.
And for most individual creative endeavors, the copyright isn't owned by the creator, it's owned by the publisher. The assignment of copyright to the publisher has become a condition of getting paid at all.
No, in the general case the copyright holder and the middleman are one and the same.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned the "copyright holders" in the TFA in particular, but I suppose I should have been more clear that I'm limiting my comments to them, and not extending them to all copyright holders everywhere.
In my humble opinion, copyright should be nontransferable, and should belong solely to the original creator of a work, or to every individual involved in the joint creation of a work. It's fine for the copyright holder(s) to exclusively license their work(s) to a corporation, even for free, but the right for them to terminate the license at will (despite any contractual wording to the contrary) should be built into law. This is the only way I can see copyright properly benefitting the original creators of a work. The system we have right now, where copyright is almost always immediately and irrevocably transferred to some corporation, is little more than a system of slavery.
I suspect that the original authors of the Constitution saw it that way, too.
They never have. Perhaps the biggest role of the corporations that belong to the organizations mentioned in TFA is to act as a middleman. Today they add almost no value to the economic equation. That means they're basically parasites. Parasites that, in this case, don't give a fuck about the host (the public) they prey upon.
As long as they get theirs, that's all that matters to them. And they will do everything in their considerable power to make sure that remains the case. They embody everything that is wrong with modern crony capitalism.
It's long past time for them to die.
Oh, don't worry. They'll change their viewpoint eventually...when they find that they're living in an oppressive police state. Of course, it'll be far too late by then, but they'll at least be getting what they deserve...
What completely-out-of-his-mind moron decided this would be a good idea?
I'm sorry, but I refuse to get an account with a debit card. I will always insist on an ATM card and make sure the account in question cannot have a debit card issued against it.
Now, admittedly the particular case in TFA involves PINs, so ATM cards would ostensibly be susceptible to the same attack, but it beats not having anything at all protecting your account...
What? They're not doing any such thing. Want proof? Watch me say something anti-government:
This government is the worst on the planet. Thanks to it, I'm surprised anyone wants to live here!
See? Nothing happened to me. There's nothing to worry about. You can say and do anything you##$:(!*NO CARRIER
That doesn't matter. All that matters is who's writing the checks, and who controls the media.
In both cases, the entities in question probably want this legislation. That means they'll get it.
This will be passed into law despite any opposition, even if it means adding it as a rider to some other all-important bill.
The vast majority of telemarketers will just hang up. That's fine with me.
I just wish they'd figure out that they're never going to get an answer from anyone here at my place anymore.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people like me is growing fast.
Congratulations, telemarketing industry. You are likely to be telemarketing yourselves out of business. Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on your ass on the way out.
Bitkeeper, then?
Then a congressional aide will attempt to reverse engineer the protocol it uses and get caught. Bitkeeper will revoke the license, and Congress will wind up implementing their own version control system and releasing it as Free software!
Sounds like a plan to me! Well, except that the resulting revision control system will be so convoluted and have so many loopholes, exploits, etc., as to be useless. What else would you expect from Congress?
Man, I just love it when people say things like this. They inevitably make some sort of mistake which negates their statement very nicely. For instance, it's "grammar", not "grammer".
So of course it can run, and run well, on older hardware. The only question is what you have to give up to make it work well.
This ain't the 1700's. Back then, the average firepower of an armed civilian was only slightly less than the average firepower of a soldier.
Today, the average firepower of a soldier is, after you factor in all the supporting firepower he has at his disposal (tanks, mortars, bombs, aircraft, etc.) is thousands of times that of the average civilian. And if we include weapons of mass destruction, that ratio rises to millions.
If the King of England had been able to drop a nuke onto the U.S. revolutionaries, the revolution would have been stopped dead in its tracks. What makes you think that a government whose existence is threatened by its own population won't be willing to do the same (and that's only if the thousands-to-one firepower advantage they already have proves to not be enough)?
So don't go busting out the U.S. revolution as a shining example of what can be accomplished today, because it doesn't even come close to applying to the modern world.
No, not impossible, I'll grant you that.
But even if you shake people's faith in the media, the media in question has to be replaced with something that is as easily accessible. Not only must it be as easily accessible, it must also not be centrally controlled (for if it's centrally controlled then those who currently control the media can gain control over it, and we're back to where we started).
There is nothing that meets those requirements. Not even the internet. Every other method of information distribution requires a lot more work on the part of the recipient. If you try to ignore the inherent laziness of humans, then your attempt at replacing the mass media will have failed before it begins.
What's in my head is the result of observing the real world. I'm a realist. What "control" the PTBs have over me is at the point of a gun. I don't listen to the mass media. If I did, I wouldn't recognize the problem. I do recognize the problem. I also recognize, because I'm a realist, that it's effectively impossible to fix it now. We're way past the point of no return. Ignore that at your own peril, for the real world doesn't give a crap what you believe.
It's not like there's anything else that can possibly be done anymore. Nobody who understands the situation and wants to change it has enough power or control to do anything about it. Those who do have that kind of power and control are the very people who benefit from the situation.
And there's no chance for a revolution to work, because the government has all the guns that matter.
So what, really, can the citizens possibly do? Talk about it? That won't do any good. Talk without action does nothing, and the government controls what actions are possible.
No, it's basically impossible.
The reason it's impossible is that people make their decisions based on what they know, and even now what they know is determined primarily by what the mass media tells them.
And that mass media is owned by a small number of large corporations, which are in turn controlled by the very people who are responsible for getting us into this mess to begin with. Those people want nothing but absolute power, absolute control.
Until the information people receive comes primarily from some other source, election of someone who belongs to neither party (or, more precisely, who doesn't answer to the people who control the media) will remain effectively impossible.
Oh, and I might also mention that violent revolution cannot succeed either. The government has all the guns that really matter, and the pathetic peashooters that the general population is "allowed" to have cannot stand against the hardware that the government now controls.
Better get used to living in a totalitarian state. It's going to be with us for a very, very long time.
Yep. It's obviously gotta be present day. Which means...
Pay no mind to this. It's just SG-1 at it again.
No. In the case of Mozilla, it's because it's free and has a sufficient number of additional features (not the least of which is that it's far more secure). If either of those things were not true, then it wouldn't be able to "compete".
When the nature of a market is such that the only way to "compete" against the dominant money-making player is to build your product using the freely-given labor of others and then turn around and give it away for free (source and all!), then the market itself isn't free at all: it's monopolized. In fact, it's monopolized to the point that only the monopolizer can make money in it, a far worse situation than most monopoly situations.
As for Apple, the only reason they are a player in the market is that they sell their own computer systems with their own OS and with the product in question bundled with it. Without that, they never would have gotten a foothold. Beyond that, they too give away the software in question (at least for Windows), so they're not really making any money in the market, either.
Microsoft's bundling of various products (e.g., media player) forces their competition to give away their products for free. A market in which the only company that can get away with charging (indirectly) for its product happens to be the monopolizer is no market at all.
It's only because of the unique nature of software that free alternatives exist at all: software has a low enough barrier to entry that people can produce it in their spare time, can easily be modified and improved upon by others, and can be replicated at will. That means that one needn't spend any more time or money to produce it than they would with any other hobby. If any of those conditions weren't true, free software as we know it would not exist at all, and the monopoly that Microsoft really has would be blindingly obvious.
Uh, no. PostgreSQL isn't owned by any company. Because of that, Oracle can't do the same thing to it that it did to MySQL. That makes it an excellent possible backend for SAP, if SAP needed such a thing.
Furthermore, it's under the BSD license, so SAP wouldn't even need to redistribute the source in order to make use of it.
That needn't be the case. Even for IM, a quick once-over before hitting "Send" is enough to catch most errors.
Even so, I can understand why one's spelling/grammar might be somewhat lacking when using IM. But I think it's inexcusable that the same thing occurs in blogs and other, more permanent, forms of communication where the time constraint simply isn't there.
No, I think the bottom line is that the people being discussed here simply cannot write properly regardless of the forum or the circumstances. That will most assuredly cause them trouble later on, when it becomes necessary for them to write lengthy and detailed essays. At that time they'll find that they simply can't do so, because they lack the necessary skills.
The people in question apparently simply don't care how well they are communicating via the written word. If they don't care about something so fundamentally important, how likely is it that they'll care about other, equally critical things?
It is? I thought the editors were selected for their ability to uphold the grand Slashdot tradition of not RTFA before commenting (or, in this case, "editing" ... and it's not like any other particular trait appears to be selected for) ... no?
Really? What if it were the Chinese government making the same demands?
That may be true when deciding whether or not to actively interfere with the internal workings of the Chinese government.
It is absolutely not true when deciding whether or not to interact with the Chinese government (which is essentially what's required for Google, Yahoo, and others to do business there) and to acquiesce to their demands.
For all of you that are in any way still confused about this issue, let me set up an example that should make the issue very clear.
Suppose that one of China's laws is that any corporation that wishes to do business in China must assassinate whomever the Chinese government tells them to. Should Google and friends do business in China under those conditions?
I doubt anyone who values any rights at all would say yes to the above question.
Get this straight: censorship is a violation of your rights as surely as assassination is. It is at a minimum a violation of your right to free speech. The only difference is the severity of the violation.
And for those of you who believe that U.S. corporations must do business in China no matter what laws they have to follow because they have a "duty to their shareholders", consider this: do they have a similar "duty" to set up assassination ("killer for hire") businesses in countries in which assassination is legal?
Those of you who believe that corporations must do everything possible to acquire wealth had better realize one thing: completely unregulated capitalism, in which no act in the name of business is forbidden is the same as the mafia. The mafia, too, does what it does because it's "just business, nothing personal".
Such a world is an anathema to those who value their rights.
No corporation which would sacrifice the rights of others in order to do business should reap the benefits of being a U.S. corporation. Their charter should be revoked. If they want to become a Chinese corporation, then so be it. But if they want the benefits of being a U.S. corporation, then they should damned well respect the founding principles of the U.S. in everything they do, even if the U.S. government itself at this time does not (and note that the reason the U.S. government does not is that these very same corporations are the entities that now control the U.S. government).
So: better get used to living in a police state, because it's going to get a lot worse, not better.
People eat until their body tells them to stop. "Gluttony" here simply means that their body doesn't tell them to stop until it's far too late.
This is why some people, even in the U.S., aren't obese -- some people have signals that tell them to stop eating early enough that they don't wind up ingesting excess calories.
It shouldn't be surprising that there are some people like that, because the scarcity of food obviously varied between geographic areas.
And yes, the entire obesity thing is actually quite complicated in detail. Among the complicating factors are how many fat cells someone has at birth, the types of foods they naturally gravitate towards, the availability of that food, their emotional state, etc. But the basic reason it occurs at all, and the reason it's so difficult to fight, is directly tied to the circumstances the human body has (in general, more or less) evolved to deal with.
As for "laziness", that too is a factor. "Laziness" here simply means that people don't get the same amount of exercise their ancestors did. That's not surprising, as it's one of the consequences of technology and automation.
If technology and automation actually gave people a larger amount of free time, perhaps more people would exercise for longer. Perhaps not. But regardless, technology hasn't brought such benefits for most people: they still have to spend the same amount of time (if not more!) working as their ancestors did, but the types of activities involved in "work" are vastly different thanks to that technology. Hence "laziness".
By the way, it should be noted that "laziness" is also a consequence of the evolutionary process mentioned previously. "Laziness" is the unwillingness to do any more work than is necessary. It causes the "lazy" person to not expend more energy than is necessary. When food is scarce, it should be obvious that "laziness" is very much a necessary survival characteristic -- someone who needlessly expends energy when food is scarce will not be as likely to survive as someone who doesn't.
You can believe that these things are all a concious choice if you like. That doesn't mean you're correct.
Look, the cause of obesity is really very simple: the human body (and its ancestors) evolved in environments in which food was scarce, and during that time mechanisms came into being which helped to deal with that scarcity. As a result, it has built-in mechanisms to ensure that there will be sufficient energy store for the body to use for all but the most drastic of food shortages. These mechanisms include the fat store, the tendency for fat to accumulate much more easily than it's used, and an appetite control mechanism that encourages overeating (since who knows when the next meal will become available?).
Now take the human body and put it into an environment where all the food one could ever want is easily available for the taking (all it requires is a small amount of money). What do you expect will happen?
Well, duh...the body will behave as it always has: under the assumption that while food might be plentiful now, it's not likely to be plentiful for long, so better stock up now while it can.
And thus, obesity.
And the reason obesity is so difficult to deal with, and why sustained weight loss has such a lousy track record (95%+ failure rate), is simple: to fight obesity, you have to fight your own body's instinctive drive to "save up for a rainy day".
Perhaps, but the way I would go about changing them would be very different.
You see, in my mind the way to fight disinformation is with information. If someone makes a false claim about me on a page that I can edit, I'll edit the page and respond to the claim. The only modification I'll likely make to the claim itself is to add "some people believe ..." to the beginning of it.
That way the original commentary remains, but I get my say about it as well. It then becomes up to the reader to decide what they believe.
And in my opinion, the approach itself will say something about me that will hopefully be considered by the reader when they form their opinion.